Mary Rawson
American actress
Mary Rawson (née Riedel; born 1942 or 1943), also known as Mary Sweenie, is an American television producer, talk show host, writer and actress, based in Pittsburgh. She produced and hosted WQED's weekly talk show, Lyceum, for six years and portrayed Cousin Mary Owl on the Neighborhood of Make-Believe on the children's television program Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.
Early life and career
Born Mary Anne Riedel, circa 1942 or '43, Rawson is the younger of two children born to Marie (née Merriman) and Donald C. Riedel, the eldest being Donald Jr. She attended Our Lady of Mercy Academy in Oakland and Duquesne University.
Beginning in 1966 and continuing throughout the 1970s, Rawson was known solely by her then married name, Mary Sweenie.
From July 1978 through December 1984, Sweenie/Rawson was producer of WQED's weekly arts program, Lyceum.
Personal life
From March 1965 until, at the very least, November 22, 1967 (when, as "James F. Sweenie" and "Mary Riedel Sweenie", their names appeared amidst a plethora of alphabetically listed fellow "DISSENTING DEMOCRATS" on a petition/full-page paid political ad, published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, addressed to President Lyndon B. Johnson, and demanding an end to the war in Vietnam), Mary Riedel was married to WQED staffer James F. "Jim" Sweenie.
On October 2, 1976, Mary Sweenie married fellow actor Christopher Rawson, with whom she has had a son, Christopher, and daughter, Meghan.
Filmography
Notes
References
Further reading
Rawson, Mary (January 4, 1998). "Books on unrelated topics are undeniably Mamet; David Mamet makes fiction from truth and tutors actors".
“Mary Rawson” enters the record as american actress. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Mary, Rawson and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Mary Rawson” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Mary, Rawson and American provides the most credible route into that argument.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6780582. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1942, 1943, 1966 and 1978.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mary Rawson” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.